Baptism of Our Lord – Sunday, Jan. 8

Pastor Franklin Wilson

Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 72; Acts 19.1-7; St. Mark 1.4-11

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light….”

Paul asked the Ephesians, “Into what then were you baptized?”  They answered, “Into John’s baptism…”

 “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”

It’s a curious thing that both the beginning and the ending of the Gospel According to Mark are highly contested.  Perhaps more well known are the shorter and longer manuscript endings of Mark—Lutherans especially preferring the shorter (“They went out and said nothing because they were terrified.”)  But less well known may be arguments surrounding Mark’s first three verses immediately preceding today’s Gospel for the Baptism of Our Lord.  If, as some manuscripts suggest, verses 2 and 3 (Isaiah’s prophesy concerning “my messenger” and “a voice crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord…”) are not original, then Mark’s Gospel would begin something like, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ [Son of God], when John was baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins….”

As befits Mark, such a beginning would be more condensed, revealing more clearly the intimate connection between the good news of Jesus Christ and John’s wilderness baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin and, thereby, the scandal implicit in Jesus’ baptism by John.

We do not celebrate our Lord’s baptism because it is the church’s baptism, or because we (and Kole and Zachery) were baptized just like Jesus was.  We celebrate the baptism of our Lord because it was not the church’s baptism; we celebrate it because it is a sign of Jesus’ full and complete participation in the utter ordinariness of human life:  Mark says that all the surrounding country and all the people of Jerusalem went out and were baptized by John.  Getting baptized by John was apparently the thing to do, like a Billy Graham crusade or a Packers’ game, a big religious event….a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; one of those religious “change your life” sort of deals that, unfortunately, never  really changes life; changed behavior doesn’t really change the way life is.

As the reading from Acts makes clear, the baptism of John and the church’s baptism are two different things.  In Acts and in the gospels generally, John’s is a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” whereas for St.Paul and the latter church, baptism in the Name of Jesus unites the baptized with Christ himself; joins us to Christ’s death and burial in order that we might also share with Christ his resurrection from the dead.  In other words, John’s baptism is a religious event seeking amendment of this life; whereas the church practices baptism precisely because, in the end, this life is going nowhere and religion is part of the problem, the thing that alienates us from God and one another, by our very attempt to make ourselves what we are not.  The church’s baptism takes us as the sinners we are and makes us into the sinner/saints we naturally are not.

I received an email the other day from a friend who is a Lutheran theologian.  He wrote that when taken recently to a hospital emergency room suffering cardiac distress, he was asked to declare a religious affiliation, and he declared he had none.  In so doing, he remarked that our old teacher would have been proud of him.  I wrote back saying that would certainly have been true and, that, indeed, I was also proud of him.  That said, it should be noted that the hospital attendant might well have recorded my friend’s answer under the false assumption that an atheist had just checked into the hospital, whereas in point of fact my friend is a profound Christian theologian and a regular participant in the life of the church—though not, I think, in a religious sense.  And that is the key distinction: the baptism of John is a religious event; but baptism in the Name of Jesus is something more, including not only religion, but also exceeding religion to include every dimension of life as well as death, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

On the one hand, when Jesus was baptized by John nothing extraordinary happened:  “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” In other words, Jesus did what everyone else was doing and, in this sense, his baptism was an ordinary religious event.

But on the other hand, when Jesus had been baptized by John in the Jordan, something extraordinary occurred:  “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”  In other words, just when Jesus was doing what everyone else was doing, just then, when he was coming up out of the water like a drowned rat—just then—the skies were rent, and the voice of God—the very Voice that had called light and all things into being—the very Voice of God, declared, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

It may seem odd with the Festival of Christmas only a few days past, it may seem odd to recognize that, at least in the Gospel of Mark, the identification of Jesus as “Son of God,” does not occur until Jesus is an adult, a fully grown man who could walk all the way from Nazareth in Galilee in the North down into the southern country of Judea, and there enter into a religious revival without the aid of parents, angels, shepherds, stars, disciples, or magi from the East.  It may seem odd to hear that, at least in Mark, until coming up out of the water, Jesus may not have had the slightest notion that he was “the Beloved Son of God.”   It may seem odd to consider that until he came up out of the water, so far as Jesus knew or thought, he was just one more religious pilgrim participating in another big religious thing, hoping to amend his life, and return toNazaretha changed man and a better carpenter.  In short, it may seem odd to consider that Mark tells a radically different story than the other evangelists and, further, that for Mark the key thing about Jesus isn’t a fantastic religious experience, but the revelation that God decides and declares who things are and will be, and that God does so whether we intend it our not.

This, then, is the wonderful thing about Baptism:  in holy Baptism our gracious heavenly Father liberates us from sin and death by joining us to the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  In the end, it’s not about the religious things we do, but about the saving thing God does in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, his beloved Son into whom we are baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.